The Premier Workplace Culture Educational Site where the top workplace culture experts in the world share their insights

Carolyn Taylor is the founder and CEO of Walking the Talk and one of the world’s foremost experts in corporate culture. Her pioneering work in this field stretches over 25 years and every continent. During which time, she has been a tireless advocate for the recognition of culture as a key driver of performance. She is well regarded in the international business community for her provocative facilitation skills, her sound advice on culture and teams, and her inspiring public speaking.

Walking the Talk is a specialist culture change consultancy, operating globally and offering pragmatic methodology and easy-to-use tools to build internal capability to manage and lead culture. Walking the Talk’s methodologies were first introduced in Carolyn’s seminal book ‘Walking the Talk: Building a Culture for Success’ (Random House) which is considered to be the most practical guide to changing a culture on the market.

HR has always appeared to be the natural home for the mechanics of leading culture change. In recent years, however, I’ve observed another human resource in the executive team. A person whose influence over culture is potentially the most powerful of all: The Chief Financial Officer.

And What You Can Do About It

There’s a silent power within your organization that’s quietly moulding the patterns of behavior that will determine your culture. A survey probably won’t detect it, but identifying and shifting it will have a significant impact on performance. We’re not talking about values or behaviors here, but something far less universal and more specific to individual organizations. The dominant, but tacit, influencer that has the capacity to both limit and liberate a business: our shared organizational beliefs.

Leaders will often ask me what they can do to accelerate a change in their culture. As someone who likes to find ways to provide simplicity on seemingly complex and theoretical topics, I’ve long been searching for that mythical ‘one thing’ that will make the most difference. I think I’ve found it. I’ll be interested to hear if you agree with me.

Simple has been one of my mantras. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end, because once you get there you can move mountains.

~Steve Jobs

What Steve Jobs understood, that many others do not, is that it takes much more effort to achieve simplicity than it does to achieve complexity. Everything naturally expands towards the complex, unless very tightly driven the other way, and cultures are no different.

To what extent does culture play a role in investor decisions?

If you are reading this post we can assume you think culture is important. But investment in culture lags behind some of the other key contributors to performance: Brand, people, technology, process. So perhaps culture’s impact on performance is not universally believed. Executives have to focus first and foremost on those elements which will deliver the best return to their shareholders. There is a community of investment professionals who spend their lives considering company valuations and whose opinion holds considerable sway on share price.